Building a small realtime app made me realize SaaS problems are mostly UX and workflow problems
Been spending a lot of time recently building two side projects:
- an internship platform,
- and a peer-to-peer encrypted chat app.
I originally thought most of the hard work would be writing the actual features, but honestly the difficult part ended up being everything around the features:
- keeping realtime updates consistent,
- handling unreliable connections,
- notifications,
- uploads,
- weird edge cases,
- and figuring out how users actually move through a workflow.
One thing that surprised me was how quickly simple projects start becoming “systems.” Even small changes can suddenly affect state sync, responsiveness, or message flow in unexpected ways.
I’ve mostly been building with Next.js, Node.js, Socket.io, MongoDB, and Flutter. I also experiment a lot with AI coding tools like Copilot, Claude Code, Antigravity, and Gemini CLI to speed up debugging and iteration.
Still figuring things out as I go, but building these projects definitely changed how I think about SaaS products and engineering tradeoffs.
Curious what problems surprised other people the most when building their first real SaaS-style product.